


Amor Fati

by dorian_burberrycanary



Category: A Discovery of Witches (TV)
Genre: Episode 1.04, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Horseback Riding, Missing Scene, Mutual Pining, Pining, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-19 18:52:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17007243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorian_burberrycanary/pseuds/dorian_burberrycanary
Summary: He isn’t sure quite what he expected, bringing her home with so little warning and no explanation. But, as he fetches their coats from his room and glances at his bed that now smells like her sleep-warmed skin, Matthew pauses and finally admits to himself that, whatever he expected, it was somehow not this. (Missing scene for 1.04.)





	Amor Fati

**Author's Note:**

  * For [village_skeptic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/village_skeptic/gifts).



> For @village-skeptic, one of the kindest, funniest, most brilliant people and an ideal partner in both brooding and ecstatic, lovingly detailed comment meta. <3 And many thanks to my amazing beta, @mycaptainswanjones.

From his step-father’s office, he hears the phone ringing and then the blurred rise and fall of Diana’s voice.

Matthew chooses not to concentrate too hard on making out the words, but he can’t help knowing how long the call lasts or that she is upset enough to raise her voice more than once.

He relocks the office and returns his mother the key in an empty gesture that smooths over nothing.

The reception Diana would get in the great hall now would be worse than earlier.

So if he happens to meet Diana just as she reaches the bottom of the tower stairs to ask if she would like to see more of the grounds—well, Diana need never know that it wasn’t precisely an accident.

He isn’t sure quite what he expected, bringing her home with so little warning and no explanation. But, as he fetches their coats from his room and glances at his bed that now smells like her sleep-warmed skin, Matthew pauses and finally admits to himself that, whatever he expected, it was somehow not this.

 

—

 

Outside, the low grey clouds soften the light to a pearly diffuse glow as he takes her through the gardens. The gravel pathways and clipped boxwood hedges wrap around them in soothing geometric patterns, but Diana stays quiet and tense. Her earlier phone call upset her and he half-wishes he had overheard enough to know why.

He needs to tell her of the evidence he has found in the photographs, the concealed chalk circle and just how little she can trust any of her own kind. But not yet—not when she is already distressed.

Matthew hopes she’ll believe him without being at all sure it’s reasonable to expect that she will.

(She is here, though, his foolish heart answers, on his land and under his protection, which means something. It must.)

In the last easternmost garden, the fountain has already been turned off for the winter and the curved stone benches that form a segmented circle would be too cold for her to sit on for long. All that remains ahead is a lawn that edges along the western side of the enclosed pasture where Rakasa is grazing.

Matthew is about to offer that they return to the house, not because redepositing her in his tower will help, but for lack of anything else to show her that won’t put her in Ysabeau’s way, when Diana moves forward to the fence.

“Hey,” she murmurs, stretching her hand over the railing. Rakasa flicks her ears. “Yeah, you hear me.” The horse paws the ground, uneasy, and doesn't move any closer. “A real heartbreaker, huh? Playing hard to get?”

Matthew hears the smile in her voice and knows without looking that it is the same open delight he first saw during their slow walk back from his laboratory; then again in his house at Woodstock for no better reason than because he was French rather than English and later because he had noticed her blue eyes.

Rakasa goes back to grazing, but her neck bends slightly towards them in wary acknowledgement.

“She doesn’t meet new people often.” The excuse is beginning to wear thin even in his own ears.

“Shy?” Diana asks, stepping up onto the lower rail of the fence and leaning forward with one hand braced on a post.

“Temperamental.”

“Aww, you hear that?” she asks the horse. Her voice is pitched almost too low to carry over the wind but the words remain uncannily clear. “I bet you just know your own mind even when it isn’t convenient.”

Breaks in the cloud cover allow a few slanting columns of sunlight through. The light catches all the flyaways strains around her head that have come loose from her braided hair until she turns a little bit golden.

“Yeah, I know,” she tells Rakasa and sounds as though the two of them are holding a conversation only she can hear. “You don’t know what to make of me. But I’m a friend, I promise.”

Rakasa lifts her head, snorts and then ambles closer. When Diana reaches out this time, the horse noses into her palm with a soft whinny.

“Shh, shh. I don't have anything for you.” Her voice stays warm and gentle for Rakasa when she tells him, “She’s so beautiful.”

Matthew closes his eyes a moment. “Yes. She is.”

Diana runs her palm up Rakasa’s silvery grey nose and the horse nudges forward into her touch, almost overbalancing her off the fence, which only makes her laugh again, happy and carefree in a way he hasn’t seen since before her fear and anger in the Bodleian called up the rare marvel of witchwind.

(Since before that, his mind accuses, when she was brave enough to kiss him and he gave her back nothing in response.)

Rakasa butts up against Diana’s shoulder with a snicker and Diana presses her forehead against the horse, whispering hypnotic reassurance in the same soft voice. “Shh, yeah, I know, I know. You weren’t made for a pen.”

“Would you—” Matthew swallows and tries again. “Would you like to go riding?”

Diana looks back over her shoulder and shoots him a smile that lights up her whole face with a brilliant, irresistible glow.

She leans back to step off the fence rail and, without quite meaning to, he reaches out to steady her, touching her elbow just for a moment.

Diana glances up at him. She is too warm and too close, wind-blown and delighted.

_With him_ , he thinks. _Because of him_.

“Yes, I’d love that.” She doesn’t take the step back that he expects, which means that he should. He should, but he doesn’t. “Can I ride her?”

She tilts her head towards Rakasa.

“Of course,” he answers before thinking through anything else. “I’ll tell Ysabeau.” By which he means, he’ll ask her and she’ll be angry—angrier—but agree in the end all the same.

Matthew quietly adds this to the growing list of things Diana does not need to understand.

_Or_ , the hopeful part of his mind whispers against his better judgement, _at least not yet_.

As they return to the house, retracing their steps through the series of old, well-ordered gardens, he walks close enough to her that his arm brushes against hers now and again in a way that could be accidental, but isn’t.

 

—

 

Later, when she lets Rakasa have her head to run with reckless freedom and then laughs in response to caution for all that a misstep at this speed would more than likely kill her and the horse both, he wonders how he thought he would be able to resist the marvel of her wild and captivating joy.

What he wouldn’t give to see her always this happy and this free.

( _To be the cause of_ , his selfish and over-reaching heart begins—but he cuts the echo off, half-heard. For he knows, in the end, he can offer her neither.)

Rakasa tears up the ground with her gallop, born for just this exactly. 

Diana glances back at him with a laugh and another of those bright, perilous smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at [@burberrycanary](http://clktr4ck.com/qcg8).


End file.
